I'm very curious what are your opinion and arguments in this question.

My opinion is that Windows NT 4.0 was the best one, it is the most reliable version. Now I'm using XP, but if NT4 would have USB support and better Direct3D, I certainly would go on that version. I never had problems with it, and I can't say this on the other versions.

The situation is strange between XP and 2000. Here the divisions are 50% for each other. I personally don't prefer 2000. Windows XP is working significant faster (at least for me). So in this question I would opt to XP.

The 9x family is horror. Maybe Windows 95 is acceptable, but 98 and especially Me is a collection of bugs.

I was a bit unsure whether to check Windows 2000 or XP. Both have been very stable for me, as long as I've used stable hardware and drivers (both things that are outside windows' control).

Win2k has a smaller footprint (disk as well as memory), but XP both boots and operates faster on recent hardware (and if you have a HyperThreading P4, don't run 2k unless you disable HT).

There's a bunch of annoying things in XP, but those can be turned off - especially if you use http://www.nliteos.com . The footprint is still larger than 2k, but the added hardware support and minor shell enhancements makes it worthwhile for me.

So... XP for recent hardware, Win2k for older boxes, and NT4 if it's a really old box. Win9x? Only for compatbility testing.

I like all the NTs I've used (4.0 upwards). I like XP much more than I thought I would, once you turn off the graphical effects, and tweak things a bit it runs nice & smooth, and it's stable as anything else I've ever used. On top of all that it plays any DX game (both 2K and NT4 were a pain for this on particular games, although 2K less so).

bszente, another nice feature is being able to integrate drivers - which means you can install directly to, say, a RAID Mirror on SATA disks on a motherboard with NF4 chipset, without using a floppy disk with drivers on.

If you make a crudd-free version, do remember to test it - it *is* possible to accidentally remove too stuff, resulting in BSOD on startup because a critical service is no longer present :)

As long as you don't wipe your main windows partition/install, and do test installs to an alternate folder, you should be safe (long live boot.ini and being able to have several windows versions installed at one time :)).

Yes, I know that 9x and NT are two different worlds, but altough the 9x family shouldn't exist, the 98 becamed the most popular one (I think). But it realy pissed me off. Almost every time the blank buttons remained on the taskbar, it does not handle USB normally, I had problems several times. Put a bad floppy in the drive and acces it, and you cannot do anything after it, etc. The only good argument for win 98 is the Direct3D support. The games worked under it. Thats it.

For a computer with even 64Mb ram I would go on Win NT4.

But let me saying a strange thing: at the university there are a few labs where I saw NT 4 + SP6 running on Pentium I computer with just 28MB ram :shock:I couldn't believe, but it was true. Almost all the computers in that lab were in this situation. Pentium I, 28MB ram, in better cases 48MB, and the NT 4 based network. And it worked, very sloow, but worked. :lol:

I have mixed views on NT4, it was the first 32 bit Windows vesion I used as I refused to use win95oem but on the p166 I had at the time, it was appallingly slow and had poor hardware support for even simple thing like laser printers and no chance of runing a scanner. Run it on a reasonably modern box and its a different matter, it has a brisk win95 style interface and is still inherantly robust and with SP6a it ran most things reasonably well.

Its one great problem was its lack of support for FAT32 prior to sp4. You can install it and then run the upgrade to sp6a but it means you had to run an NTFS or FAT16 partition to install it. Win2k can be set up almost as fast to use as NT4 but win2k suffers from nuisance level scheduling that interferes with many thing that just run better under win95/98se, DVD players using direcX 9.? are a good example of win2k making a mess of low level access. My earlier PIV has 3/4 of a gig of memory which alows it to run win98se in dual boot with win2k and you can see the difference with directX installed on both versions on the same box.

Under win98se, it is a lot faster, smoother and does not suffer desynch problems where on both PIVs with win2k, its is slow and a bit laggy in comparison. My young brother has XP set up on both an Athlon and an AMD64 processor and his runs no better than my win2k on either. You get much the same distinction with a disk defragger, on win9x, I use Speedisk from NU2000 and its fast and does the job very well where the best of a poor lot I can get for the NT family of Windows is a new Raxco defragger which is very slow in comparison and has fewer options than the norton version. On the dual boot older PIV, I boot into win98se to defrag drives as it is simply faster and you get better results.

The scheduling on the NT family of Windows needs to be fixed as it messes up various programs that run very well on win98se and while win2k is more robust than win9x, in comparison, it tends to be slow.

Its one great problem was its lack of support for FAT32 prior to sp4. You can install it and then run the upgrade to sp6a but it means you had to run an NTFS or FAT16 partition to install it.

It should be possible to slipstream the service pack into your install files and be able to install to fat32... but why use FAT when you can use NTFS? (ACL security, journalling, proper LFN support).

If you have problems with stuttering DVD playback, try raising the priority of the player to a notch above normal - and also check that DMA is enabled for the drive (done in controller properties). I've never had any stuttering problems, neither with 2k or XP, DVD or DivX/XviD.

Btw if your P4 supports HyperThreading and you run Win2k, be sure to *turn off* hyperthreading, since the 2k scheduler isn't coded for it, and will just slow things down.

GDI is a lot faster on NT than 9x, and you can get better latencies. And there's no awful 16bit code, while 9x constantly does a lot of thunking between 32bit and 16bit code.

I don't know if it is realy a technical argument or not, but Wikipedia explains Win98 as the follows:

The new operating system was essentially an updated version of Windows 95, and like that earlier version, it was a hybrid 16-bit/32-bit product.

But it should be mentioned that the old dos4gw based programs run well under Win98, and they don't go under 2K and XP. I think this also proves that Win98 is internally based on 16 bit code, and the lack of protection of privileged instructions and ports somehow reminds me to the old 286 based 16 bit protected mode. I think that old 16 bit protected mode should not be ever existed, especially that it existed only on one generation of processors. This complicated the future due to compatibility issues. The values of a segment descriptor are so defragmented... And many other problems derive from here.

As a joke I will post here the Win98 source cod, maybe you already know it:

As already mentioned, there's a lot of 16bit pmode legacy code in win9x, carried over from win3.x. Some functions even end up calling dos interrupts (which is why you could hook GetTime or whatever by overriding a DOS function with a VxD). Also, some DOS drivers (or "unknown" hardware, before you install drivers) will force win9x to access your harddrive in "compatibility" mode - which means using the BIOS.